THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM CHAPTER 6 - THE RIDE HOME Rain thinned. Steam lifted off the blacktop and the tank. The cell dragged itself north toward the mountains the way Phoenix storms did, sudden as a fist and then gone. They stayed folded over the machine, his chest to her spine, his cock still in her, softening only by degrees. Water dripped from the red brim onto her shoulder. He finally took the aviators off and hooked them in his collar, and his eyes were a color she could not have named in the leftover dark, only that they were tired and amused and a little wrecked. He kissed the corner of her mouth. “You want a safe ride home,” he said into her hair, “you take the seat behind me. No one touches you on my bike.” Tulsi turned enough to find his mouth properly. She was a mess. Mascara somewhere down her cheek. Hair a black rope. Dress a joke. His come starting to slip out of her and down her thigh, diluted by rain, the most indecent river in Arizona. “Yes,” she said. Soft. Wrecked. Warm. “Please. Don’t let go of me yet.” He didn’t. They breathed. Somewhere a dripping eave kept time. The Harley ticked. Her hand found his, still at her hip, and laced the fingers as if they had earned a smaller intimacy after the large one. “Those two,” he said after a while. “They come back this way, they meet me first.” “I’m not a damsel.” It was important to her, even dripping and freshly fucked over a motorcycle. “I elbowed one in the throat.” “I saw that too.” The smirk returned, faint. “Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy being useful.” She laughed, a cracked little sound, and the laugh made him slip out of her. The emptiness was immediate and rude. She clenched around nothing and hated that she missed him already. “Useful,” she repeated. “That’s one word for what you just did to me.” “Got others?” “Several. Most of them not fit for the gas station clerk.” She pushed herself up off the tank. Her legs were not entirely trustworthy. He steadied her with a hand that had been inside her and around her and over her and still felt like the safest object in the county. “I live ten minutes from here if you take Thomas and don’t let the flood dips eat us. I have towels. I have whiskey. I have a shower that will fit two if one of them is five-three.” “And if I say yes?” “Then you find out whether I’m this much of a disaster when I’m dry.” He looked at her for a long second . The backwards cap, the open shirt, the body that belonged on a billboard for bad decisions. And then he swung a leg over the bike and offered her his hand as if they were about to do something civilized. “Get on, Tulsi.” She got on. The seat behind him was rain-slick. She pressed her soaked chest to his soaked back, arms around the open shirt, palms on the map of his stomach, cheek to the nape of his neck under the cap strap. The ruined dress was a belt. She did not care. Let the whole sketchy grid see her if it wanted. She had been seen worse tonight. She had been seen better, too, by a man who had asked her to tell him to stop and then had not stopped when she didn’t. The Harley woke with a low, satisfied sound. They rolled out of the alley into a Phoenix that had been washed once and would be filthy again by noon. Lightning walked away north. The air smelled like creosote and sex and wet dust, which was, she decided, the correct perfume for the rest of her life if the rest of her life was going to include this particular stranger. At a red light that no one else was obeying he reached back and found her thigh and squeezed once, possessive and checking both. “Still with me?” “Tragically,” she said into his neck. “Irreversibly. If you try to drop me at my door without coming upstairs I will consider it a fresh crime.” His laugh traveled through his back into her breasts. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” The light changed. They went. Behind them the gas station canopy buzzed on, indifferent, already drying. Ahead of them the grid opened, black and shining, and Tulsi . nymphomaniac, soaked, throbbing, strangely, stupidly happy. She held on to a man called KD and let the last of the monsoon lick her face as if the sky, too, had decided she was worth chasing. In the brief quiet of a side street she told him the rest, because stories were how she metabolized panic. She told him about the tank top and the flannel, the way the cotton had given, the pinch on her nipple that had been meant to hurt and had, traitorously, also pulled a string that ran straight to her clit. She told him about the two fingers that had not asked and the shame of being wet for them anyway. She told him she was a nymphomaniac the way some people admitted they were left-handed. A fact, a wiring, not an apology. “I know what I am,” she said into the rain on his neck. “I walked out of that shop without knickers because I like the air. I wore a dress that comes off if you look at it wrong because I like being looked at. That doesn’t mean they get to take the choice. You asked. That’s the entire difference. You asked, and I said don’t stop, and now I have your cum running down my leg, and I feel like a person again.” He didn’t give her a speech. He wasn’t a speech man. He reached back, found the wet inside of her thigh, and smeared his own mess higher with two fingers as if to keep it, as if to say: mine, then. The possessiveness should have frightened her. It settled her instead. She opened her knees a fraction on the seat and let him do it. “Upstairs,” she repeated, because the grid was starting to look like geography again and geography meant doors and decisions. “Towels. Whiskey. If you have somewhere else to be. ” “I don’t.” “Good. I’m going to put you in my shower and wash the alley off both of us and then I’m going to see if that cock gets just as rude when it isn’t raining.” “It does.” Dry as dust. “Fair warning.” She smiled against his nape. The cap’s strap was a thin dark line she wanted in her teeth. The red underside flashed whenever a passing headlight caught it. She decided, with the same impulsive authority that had put her on this bike, that she was going to fuck him in the cap and the glasses at least once on dry land, as a scientific control. They took Thomas. The flood dips were ugly but he knew them, slowing the Harley into the water and out again without splashy heroics. A man who understood water. She filed that away with the smirk and the abs and the way he had said easy when she hit him. Her complex was two stories of beige stucco and a carport full of other people’s bad decisions. He killed the engine. The sudden absence of vibration made her cunt pulse around the memory of him. She slid off the seat and her knees informed her that standing was a rumor. He caught her again. Of course he did. Under the carport light, she saw him properly for the first time without rain in her eyes. The face from the first collision was the same face: handsome in a lived-in way, salt-and-pepper stubble, that almost-smirk that had never fully left. The open shirt was a wreck. The jeans were a crime scene. He looked like a billboard that had survived a hurricane and was still selling the product. “Keys,” she said. At the threshold she paused, palm on his soaked sternum, and did the last piece of choosing out loud, because choosing out loud was the point of the whole filthy night. “KD. If you come in here, you’re not a rescue anymore. You’re a man I dragged home." Not from the two men. She had saved herself from the two men with an elbow and a run. Saved from the version of the night that ended in an alley with no chrome in it. His hand found her waist, as if it had been measured in the rain and would now be used as a standard. She did not ask him to move it. She thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that she was the worst kind of girl, and that the worst kind of girl sometimes got exactly the night she needed.

THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM CHAPTER 1 - THE BAKING ASPHALT The fluorescent canopy over the pumps still held the day’s heat like a lid. Phoenix did that in early September. She stored the sun in the asphalt and the stucco and the cheap metal of the lot signs and then bled it back after midnight, a low animal breath against the ankles. Tulsi pushed the glass door with her hip and stepped out into it with a plastic bottle of water sweating in her hand and a pale strapless sundress clinging to the places a dress was supposed to cling. She was twenty-five and built like the kind of trouble men invented religions to explain. Five feet and three when she stood on her toes, cinched waist, hips that made the short hem of the sundress a negotiation. The bodice was a single band of thin cotton, saffron and sand, cut to show the deep inner curves of her E-cup breasts and nothing of the nipples, which the fabric covered and which the heat had already drawn tight underneath. Matching sandals. A thin gold anklet. Hair like poured ink down to her waist, a few strands stuck to her oiled brown throat. She looked like she had taken a wrong turn out of a magazine and into a neighborhood that sold lottery tickets and prepaid phones and did not ask questions after dark. She cracked the cap. Swallowed. The water was so cold it hurt. “God, it’s still baking out here,” she murmured, vowels soft and private, as if the lot might answer. She pulled her dress down to cool off her chest, then hurriedly covered up. It caught unwanted attention. ... continued in Chapter 2 - The Unwanted Attention

THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM Chapter 2 - Unwanted Attention Two men peeled off the dark at the edge of the pumps. Latino, early thirties. They did not hurry. Men who meant to take something rarely hurried; hurrying admitted the thing might get away. Tulsi’s body knew before her mind did. The old animal arithmetic: two of them, one of her, no cameras that worked, the clerk inside already looking at his phone. She took a step back toward the door and found it had sighed shut. “Don’t,” she said, palm coming up. “I’m not interested.” The one in the tank smiled with all his teeth. “Nah, mami. You walked out looking like that, you interested.” She turned. She was fast when she wanted to be. Gymnast hips, runner’s calves. But the lot was small, and they had already chosen their angle. One caught the back of her dress at the zipper line that wasn’t there, because the dress was strapless, and the cotton gave with a sound like a small animal being torn. “Fuck. Get off. ” Hands. That was the first fact. Not faces, not names. Hands. One at her waist yanking the bodice down so the ruined saffron band peeled to her hips and her breasts spilled into the sick green-white light, heavy and shocked, nipples already tight from the heat now tighter from fear and the sudden air. The other hand shoved up under the remaining skirt and found her bare. She had not worn anything under the dress. Phoenix in September. She had told herself it was the heat. She had not told herself the other reason, which was that she liked the secret of it, the slick knowledge that she was one tug from being meat on a street. They used that knowledge. A rough palm dragged over her left nipple and pinched until she cried out. Another hand. She could not have said whose. It shoved two thick fingers between her thighs and found her cunt already wet, which shamed her more than the tearing did. She was a woman who got wet at the wrong times. She had always been that woman. Fear and heat and the scrape of callouses over her clit braided into something her body refused to unbraid. The fingers shoved into her, dry enough to burn, wet enough to slide, and a thumb mashed her clit as if trying to put out a light. “Look at this puta,” someone said into her hair. “Dripping.”

THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM Chapter 3 - The Escape She drove her heel into an instep and her elbow into a throat and ran with her dress around her waist and her breasts loose and one sandal slapping off. They shouted. They did not immediately follow. Maybe the clerk had looked up. Maybe they were laughing. She did not turn to find out. The alley swallowed her. Graffiti. A dumpster that smelled like rot and orange soda. An orange security bulb the color of cheap whiskey. Oil stains that looked wet even when they were not. She hit the block wall with her shoulder and kept going, forearms crossed hard over her breasts, the torn cotton slapping her thighs, breath tearing in that soft British register she could never quite flatten. “Please, please, not this, not tonight. ” Then chrome.

THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM Chapter 4 - A Man, A Harley A Harley. Black tank, high bars, the engine still ticking from a recent ride. A man astride it as if the alley were a porch. White shirt open to the navel and beyond, sleeves rolled to mid-forearm, dark jeans, boots on the grit. Aviator sunglasses at midnight. A dark baseball cap on backwards, the red underside of the brim a small flag. Salt-and-pepper stubble. A confident, infuriating almost-smirk. Lean the way runners are lean, not gym-bro thick . His six-pack like a relief map, obliques cut into the V that disappeared into the jeans, pectorals that made the open shirt look like a decision rather than an accident. Vascular forearms. Late forties, early fifties. The face of a man who had been handsome at twenty-five and had simply refused to stop. She hit him the way weather hits a wall. He caught her without dropping the bike. Thighs clamped the tank. One big hand splayed at the small of her back. The other found her waist. Bare, hot, trembling. And stayed there as if it had been designed for that exact span. “Easy,” he said. American. Southwest. Like gravel that had been left in the sun. “I’ve got you. Nobody follows you past this bike.” Tulsi shoved her face into the open V of his shirt and the smell of him. Clean sweat, cotton starch, a ghost of cologne, hot metal. The sob that came out of her was not pretty. Her fists knotted in the white cloth. Her breasts, still bare, crushed against the ridges of his abdomen. She could feel her own wetness cooling on her inner thighs where those other hands had been. “They tore it. ” The words came into his skin. “They put their hands on me. I didn’t. I ran.” “I saw the end of it.” His thumb moved at her waist, not quite a stroke. “You want the cops, I’ll ride you to a well-lit lot, and we’ll call. You want a shirt, you can have this one. You want to stand here for a minute and remember how to breathe, we can do that too.” She nodded into his chest. Breathing. Yes. That. His hand at her waist did not leave. It settled. It learned her. The smirk she had seen in the first half-second had softened by a degree, but the cap stayed backwards, and the glasses stayed on, as if he were a man who did not take off his armor for strangers even when they were crying on his abs. Thunder walked across the valley. Phoenix monsoons did not negotiate. They arrived like a verdict. The first drop hit the Harley tank with a sound like a fingernail on glass. Then another. Then the sky tore. Wind came down the alley as if it had been waiting behind the dumpster. Dust first, then rain so fat it hurt. In ten seconds they were soaked. The ruined sundress became transparent rags from her waist down. His white shirt glued itself to every plate of muscle he owned. Water sheeted off the red underside of his cap brim and down the lenses of the aviators and still he did not take them off. Tulsi should have pulled away. She was a grown woman. She knew the difference between rescue and the thing that sometimes wore rescue’s clothes. His hand had slid from her waist to the underswell of her breast, thumb brushing the tight, rain-slick nipple he had not been invited to touch, and the sound she made was not a protest even though her mouth shaped one. “We shouldn’t". Rain in her mouth, shaking. “This is mad. ” “Then tell me to stop.” A beat of water hammering metal. “…don’t stop.”

THE RED UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIM Chapter 5 - What Just Happened? He kissed her like a man who had decided at the first collision and had only been waiting for the weather to agree with him. His mouth was hot in the cold rain. Stubble scraped her lip. She opened for him because her body had already opened for worse, and this, at least, she had chosen in the slim way a cornered woman chooses. His tongue took her the way his hand had taken her waist . Like it belonged there. She tasted rain and him. Her palm found the hard ladder of his stomach and dragged down, greedy, shameless, the nymphomaniac fact of her rising through the fear like it always did. She had been fingered by strangers in a parking lot five minutes ago, and she was soaking the remains of her own dress for a man whose name she did not have. “KD,” he said against her teeth, as if he had heard the question. “People call me KD.” “Tulsi.” She bit his lower lip. “If you’re going to put your hands on me, you can at least say it.” “Tulsi.” He said it like a dirty word and a prayer. His hand left her breast, found the rucked cotton at her hip, and shoved it higher. Rain ran down her belly and into the trimmed dark of her cunt. Two of his fingers. Cleaner than the others, longer, sure. Parted her and slid into the mess those men had made and the mess she was making now. She jolted. “Christ. ” “You’re soaked.” Not a question. A verdict, like the rain. “They scare you that much, or you always like this?” “Always.” It came out raw. She hated how true it was and loved that he had asked. “I’m the worst kind of girl. I get wet when I run. I get wet when I’m angry. I got wet when they. ” She gasped as his fingers crooked. “Don’t stop. I don’t want the story. I want this.” She should have been thinking about tetanus and witnesses and whether the clerk had finally looked up from his phone. She thought, instead, about the way KD’s stomach flexed under her palm when he breathed, each ridge a small argument for staying. The aviators made him unreadable and that, perversely, made her wetter. A man you could not quite see was a man you could write anything onto. She wrote: safe. She wrote: dangerous. She wrote both in the same stroke. A sheet of rain hit them sideways. Her hair became a single heavy rope down her spine. The gold anklet was a cold ring. She realized she was grinding on his thigh, the wet cotton of what was left of the dress a useless suggestion between her cunt and his jeans, and she did not stop. “Tulsi,” he said again, tasting it. “You always climb men you just met, or is it the weather?” “It’s the weather,” she lied, then ruined the lie: “It’s also you. It’s also the fact that I can still feel their fingers and I need someone else’s inside me before those become the ones I remember.” His jaw went tight. Not anger at her. Anger at the night, at the lot, at the two silhouettes who had put that sentence in her mouth. The hand at her hip became a promise. He worked her standing in the alley while the monsoon tried to erase the block. Two fingers, then three, his palm grinding her clit on every stroke, his other hand in her hair now, under the dripping black weight of it, holding her mouth to his. She came on his hand with a broken sound that was almost a laugh, thighs shaking, tit pressed to the cold wet cotton over his ribs, the Harley’s chrome burning ice against her hip. He opened his jeans with the hand that was not inside her. She looked down because she had always looked. She was a woman who admired what was about to ruin her. He was thick, heavy, cut, flushed dark at the head, the kind of cock that made the word immense feel like an understatement and a courtesy. Rain ran down the shaft. Veins stood up. He was so hard the thing lifted toward his own stomach when he let go of it. She wrapped her fingers around him, and her fingertips did not meet. A sound came out of her that had nothing to do with fear. “Fuck,” she whispered, reverent and filthy. “Look at you. You’re obscene. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all night, and I’ve had a very crowded night.” “You going to keep talking,” he said, his smirk back, rain on the aviators, “or you going to let me put it in you?” She hooked a leg around his hip. He lifted her as if she weighed what the dress weighed. The wall was on one side and the bike on the other and the rain made a third wall. He notched himself to her and the first inch opened her so wide her mouth fell open on nothing. She was wet enough. She was not ready enough. The two facts fucked each other in her head while he fed her his cock one thick increment at a time until she was seated on him, stuffed, stretched around a man she had known for the length of a thunderstorm. “Oh. God. KD. ” “Breathe.” She breathed. He waited, buried, the head of him kissing someplace deep that made her eyes go wet for a different reason. Then he fucked her standing up in a Phoenix alley while the sky emptied itself on both of them. It was not gentle. It was not cruel. It was the exact pressure of a man who had decided she was his problem now and intended to solve her. Each thrust lifted her onto her remaining sandal. Her torn dress flapped at her waist like a surrendered flag. His open shirt slapped wet against her nipples and then dragged off them, the starched cotton a rasp, the rain a second mouth. She could see, over his shoulder, lightning turn the brick white. She could see his cap brim, red, dripping. She could see her own brown hands on the white of his back. “Harder,” she heard herself say, because she was that girl, because the fear had nowhere to go except into wanting. “If you’re going to save me, save me properly. Fill me. I want to feel it in my throat.” He gave her that. The wet slap of him into her became a metronome under the rain. His balls, drawn tight, tapped her ass. She clawed the back of his neck under the cap strap. When she came the second time, it pulled her whole body into a bow against him, and she bit his shoulder through the shirt to keep from screaming into the neighborhood. Between thrusts she catalogued him like a woman who might have to reconstruct a crime later and wanted the evidence to be filthy. The backwards cap never moved. The red brim dripped a steady tick onto her shoulder. His shirt, glued open, framed the working of his abs as he lifted her and dropped her on his cock. She had never been with a man this lean who was also this strong; the runner’s body was a trick, a lightness that hid the fact he could hold five-foot-three of soaked supermodel off the ground and fuck her as if gravity were optional. She told him so, because she was a talker when she was being ruined. “You’re going to put me down and I’m going to fall over,” she gasped. “And then you’re going to pick me up again. I can tell. You have that look. The useful look.” “Quiet.” It was not unkind. He kissed the word into her. “You talk when you’re scared you’re going to like it too much.” “I already like it too much.” Honesty was a habit she had never broken, even when it got her torn dresses. “I’m going to think about this cap when I come for months. I’m going to think about the red bit. It’s obscene. You’re obscene. Your cock is stretching me so wide I can feel my heartbeat on it.” He made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a man coming close and refusing. His control was its own kink. She felt him throb inside her and not spill, and the denial made her viciously fond of him. He did not come. He pulled out of her with a sound that was almost obscene in its reluctance, set her on her feet, and turned her. “Hands on the bars.” The Harley’s grips were wet rubber. She bent. The tank was slick and a little warm from the engine’s memory. Her breasts flattened to chrome. Her ass; full, round, rain-glossed. It presented itself because there was nothing else for it to do. He shoved the last of the dress up over her hips, then remembered to tear it off completely. There was not much left anyways. For a second she felt air and rain on her hole and her cunt both, equally exposed, equally his. He pushed back into her from behind in one long, owning slide. Doggie over a motorcycle in a monsoon was not a position that allowed dignity. She did not want dignity. She wanted the particular humiliation of being taken like this by a stranger with a backwards cap and a hero complex while two men who had started the night’s work were still somewhere out in the rain. She wanted the contrast. She wanted the rewrite. Every thrust rewrote a fingerprint on her skin. “You feel that?” His voice had gone rougher. One hand on her hip, thumb in the dimple there. The other reached under, found her clit, and worked it in mean little circles timed to his hips. “That’s me. Not them. You come on this bike, you come for me.” “Yes. ” She was sobbing again, but it was the other kind. “Yes. Yours. Don’t you dare stop. Don’t you. KD, I’m. ” The storm peaked with them. Thunder on top of thunder. A transformer somewhere popped and the orange bulb died and they were only lightning and chrome and the wet filthy percussion of his cock driving into a cunt that had decided, with characteristic sluttish wisdom, that this was the best thing that had happened to it all year. She came with her mouth open on the tank, breath fogging metal, ass shoving back to take him to the root. He followed on a groan that sounded dragged out of a man who did not groan for just anyone, pulsing into her in thick, hot ropes she felt as a distinct event, a filling, a claim. He kept his hips flush and let it land as deep as anatomy allowed.